Students pull of first BHS lip dub, could help district

Ben Stiles films the opening of the BHS lip dub with Al Aldrich and Hannah Bunnell on Sunday. Photo by Jonathan Benton. (click for larger version)

May 09, 2012

BERLIN — A rag tag group of Berlin High School students came in on their day off Sunday to pull off the school's first ever lip dub and it just might help out the district as a whole.

About 40 Mountaineers were seen dancing, running, jumping and cartwheeling through BHS. The lip dub project originated as an assignment from Heather Piche's publications class that took on a life of its own. Two of her students came up with and organized the event, Tyler Leighton and Christina Morin, after checking out a video made by a North Country sports rival.

"We were watching it in class one day, I'm not sure who brought it up, the White Mountains lip dub and thought , 'that's kind of awesome' which went into this," said Leighton.

Starting at 1 p.m. the students gathered together for only three hours of blocking and filming. While WMRHS relied more upon multiple members of the school staff and a lip dub committee, BHS had only Piche and two students to organize the event. In the end this would give BHS' lip dub more of an improvisational feel. Running the course of about three songs the group started outside of the school and journeyed through several departments like the weight room and art room before a finish in the gym.

The man behind the camera was Ben Stiles with the know how to use the high definition Sony camcorder which the school district recently purchased for a promotional video. Ben and his brother Nate Stiles have been working on a project for the district highlighting the key parts of the each school within it.

"The district video is to highlight Berlin," said Ben, "We want people here and we're highlighting technology we're using like smart boards, iPads and also our sports program."

The lip dub is slated to be the latest addition to that district video after weeks of editing and will eventually be on the district website later this summer. There might be a youtube release of just the lip dub video sooner than later, but that has yet to be determined, noted Piche.

"There may not have been a lot of people but we still had a lot of fun doing it, it was a good time," said Morin. "It might be a yearly thing for BHS, I would like to see a lot more people and teachers get involved to make it more of a school thing. The publications class was talking about making it a Berlin event."